


The Stare

by DoubleBit



Category: Metalocalypse
Genre: Gen, M/M, See Chapters for Tags
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-21
Updated: 2016-11-21
Packaged: 2018-09-01 09:40:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,846
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8619412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DoubleBit/pseuds/DoubleBit
Summary: Three one-shots, in which Pickles doesn't have to do much to make everyone uncomfortable.





	1. 1989 - Pirate Jenny's Pub, Los Angeles CA

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings/tags for this chapter:  
> Underage smoking, drinking & drug use, Reference to underage prostitution, Homophobic slurs

1989…

“Isn’t that the same kid who showed up to our last two gigs?”

Tony poses the question to no-one in particular, and part of him hopes that no-one is listening, since it’s totally lame to _notice_ things – especially things like other people, and especially kids who are clearly a couple of birthdays shy of legal. Still, it’s hard not to notice that _hair_ – orange as an L.A. sunset, and so messy that Tony wonders how even manages to _see._

(“You should let people get a look at you,” he’ll say later, which is funny because Tony’s been hiding behind his own hair for as long as he can remember.)

The kid wears his uniform well enough – the leather jacket, the earrings, the tight jeans with ripped knees – but Tony knows a fish when it’s out of water. Not that he thinks of people as fish, because he doesn’t – there’s just something in the eyes, like you can almost _see_ the reflection of someplace that isn’t all concrete and glass and filth.

(“So what’s Wisconsin like?” he’ll ask, but Pickles will shrug and say, “I dunno – fackin’ cold an’ shitty and boring,” and a few months later he’ll have that long, city-stare just like everyone else.)

The first time the kid showed up – to a $5 gig in East Los Angeles – Tony tripped over his own aux cord, like just the sight of him had shorted the circuits in Tony’s brain and transformed him back into stumbling teenage Antonio, while Lenny – the singer and egomaniac behind Wide Wings of Death’s recent local success – glared at him and mouthed an acid “What. The _fuck?_ ” over his shoulder.

The second time was at a house show in Gardena – in a dank, smoky basement with a ceiling so low that Tony had to slouch or take off his hat. He figured it was a coincidence, except for this time the kid just _stared_ at him, like he was waiting for Tony to turn into a fucking pumpkin or something. But when they finished their set, Tony looked up and he was gone, and he spent the rest of the night asking around to see if anyone knew the name of the skinny kid with the freckles and the crazy red hair. He didn’t know why he cared – he didn’t _want_ to care, and Tony thought he’d finally stopped fixating on why other people did things. Nobody knew anything, though, except that the kid had puked all over Rosa’s brother’s sofa and then left the party with some other guy.

(Tony will finally touch that hair when Pickles starts vomiting miso soup and sake onto an empty Metro platform somewhere in Central Los Angeles.)

That house-show was three weeks ago, and just as Tony’s maybe managed to convince himself that he doesn’t desperately _hope_ this kid shows up, there he is, pushing quarters into the pinball machine in the back corner of Pirate Jenny’s Pub while Wide Wings of Death sets up their gear on a riser the size of a coffee table. He’s charmed his way into a whole pack of cigarettes, apparently, and he pauses his play to light one up, eyes landing squarely on Tony, and Tony wonders if _he_ ever looked even half that cool as a teenager.

Then the kid gives him this funny little smile, and by the time Tony finally regains his senses, the show’s over and he’s carrying his Peavey out to where Lenny’s got the van idling in the alley.

“Heey Tony – ya gat a light?”

Tony nearly drops the amp on his foot, and wouldn’t _that_ be fucking typical. He’s always been a disaster like that – a wicked combination of jumpy and clumsy that his classmates at St. Bernard found endlessly amusing. (He’d only taken up the bass when a friend suggested he was too ham-fisted to be any good at guitar.) He’s nearly mastered his jitters by now – thanks to a steady regimen of weed, Quaaludes, and (more recently) heroin – but the kid stone-cold snuck up on him, and anyway, talking to people has always filled him with a kind of nervous dread.

The accent’s a surprise – that draw on the vowels that’s about as uncommon as snow in southern California – and even from several feet away, Tony catches a strong whiff of vodka, body odor and hairspray. He loads his amp into the van and pretends not to notice the glint of a zippo peeking out of the kid’s front pocket as he fumbles for his own plastic Bic, mumbling, “Uh, yeah, totally, sure.”

But the kid doesn’t take the lighter from his hands, only leans forward expectantly with a cigarette hanging between his lips, waiting for Tony to oblige. Tony feels a rush of relief when he manages a flame on the first flick, and prays to God he doesn’t accidentally set this kid’s hair on fire. He’s got a million questions, but the one he blurts out is, “How’d you know my name?”

The kid smirks at him and shrugs. “Asked around,” he says, looking at his shoes and then sweeping his hair out of his eyes for a few seconds. “I’m Pickles.” 

“Pickles?”

“Yeah.”

(He’ll wait til they’re both strung-out to say, “I love you,” and Tony will reply, “I love you too, man.” And Pickles – who Tony has wanted since the moment they met, who looks like one of those beautiful places in a magazine that you know you’ll never be able to go – shakes his head and says, “No, dood – I don’t mean it like dat. I mean it like da wee _girls_ mean it.”

And _that_ will fuck Tony up for good.)

But right now, having no idea how profoundly Pickles will destroy him, he just says, “Well hey man – thanks for coming to our shows.”

Pickles snorts. “Yer beend fackin’ sucks, dood. ‘Cept fer dat one sang – da one, ya know, about how Los Angeles is ganna fall aff into da sea an’ we’ll all be eaten by sharks. I love dat sang enough dat I’ll pay $5 to hear it.”

“That one’s mine.”

“I know.”

Tony waits uneasily for Pickles to explain himself. He’s got to have a better reason than _that_ for showing up to three gigs in a row, for staring Tony down and then seeking him out like this, but then again, maybe it’s all totally normal, and it’s _Tony_ who’s being weird, who’s reading into things, who’s making up a story where there isn’t one. In the few seconds of silence that pass between them, Pickles’ stomach gurgles. He looks hungry – tired – like he’s working on something, making plans maybe, but also like it’s been a while since he had a decent meal or a full night’s sleep. 

“Hey, man – you hungry? They got pretty good food here. Why don’t you let me buy you some nachos or something at the bar?”

The boy’s green eyes narrow sharply, arms folding across his chest in a stance that Tony recognizes as defensive, no matter how flip Pickles tries to sound when he blows a cloud of smoke directly in Tony’s face and asks, “Fer what?”

Tony chokes back on a cough. “What do you mean, for what?”

“Like, ya get me nachos an’ den what?”

“And then we hang out at the bar and eat nachos?”

“An’ dat’s it?”

Tony doesn’t like the shift the conversation has taken, or the implication of it. He shoves his hands into his pockets. “Well, yeah. Or I mean, you could get like, onion rings or whatever.” He pulls out a small roll of tens – money he’d planned to spend on smack and gasoline. “They uh, actually pay us when we play here so, yeah… my treat.”

Pickles eyes the cash with suspicion and arches an eyebrow. He sighs, kind of exasperated, like Tony just isn’t understanding the question. “Jest nachos, dough? No fackin’ tricks? Y’ain’t ganna buy me a bunch’a food an’ den tell me I owe ya a fackin’ hand-jab er nothin’?”

The question makes Tony feel a little sick, and he thinks about his sixteen-year-old self, sitting in his bedroom at his parents’ house in Marina del Rey, practicing the dexterity exercises his guitar teacher assigned him while his mother made ravioli from scratch, and the closest he ever got to a hand-job was jerking himself off in the shower and thinking about the boy that sat two seats in front of him in Spanish class.

“Jesus Christ,” he says. “ _No._ No weird shit. Just – I was gonna maybe get some food anyway, and your stomach sounds like a goddamn monster, so I thought maybe I’d offer. You don’t have to – I don’t fucking care – but I’m not like, some fucking creep, okay?”

Pickles smiles then, and grinds his cigarette out on the pavement with the sole of the saddest-looking Chucks Tony has ever seen. “Yeah, okee.”

He has a fake, Tony learns once they go back inside, and the name on it is Christopher P. McKinnon.

“Is that your real name?” he asks, and Pickles replies with a mouth full of hot cheese:

“Fer now.”

He’s from some fucking town Tony’s never heard of, and he’s been in L.A. five months and still hasn’t seen the ocean. He runs deliveries, he says, at a Chinese place that’s just a few blocks from Tony’s apartment, and Tony almost asks the kid if he’s got an okay place to stay, but it seems too personal, too soon, and so he doesn’t. He just listens to Pickles ramble – about the wildfire he saw out the window of the bus on his ride from Wisconsin, about the Les Paul he bought, the music he’s been listening to, this drum kit he played around on at a party last week, the secret he’s discovered about adding peanut butter to his Top Ramen – and Tony says a word here and there, but somehow Pickles is laughing and smiling like it’s the best conversation he’s ever had, and Tony just tries not to notice the way Pickles keeps licking his fingers and wiping them on his jeans.

(Five years later, Pickles will stop by Tony’s place on his way to LAX with that same black duffle he brought from Wisconsin, and he’ll knock on Tony’s door, but Tony will be too faded to do more than sit up for a few seconds before slumping back onto the sofa, so Pickles will say his goodbye through the streaky glass of the front window, hands framing his face as he peers inside and shouts, “Gaddamnit, Tony – if ya OD an’ die, I sweer to Gad I’m ganna tell everyone what a total fackin’ faggot y’are.” But all Tony can think about is the way)

Pickles grins when grabs a bar napkin and scribbles down the phone number of the restaurant where he works and says, “Gimmie a call if ya want me to hook y’up with some rice sometime.”


	2. 1992 - Racine Correctional Institution, Sturtevant WI

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings/Tags for this chapter:  
> Prison, Underage drinking & drug use, DIY nipple piercings, Incest undertones, General Sethness, Homophobic language

1992…

“Holy fack.”

In the relative stillness of the library, Seth’s startled whisper sounds obscenely loud. He looks around to see if anyone else has heard, then feels foolish as he finds himself standing alone in front of the rack of month-old magazines that the RCI keeps in its reading room, the addresses of the subscribers neatly clipped out by the young man who manages the materials before the library opens each Wednesday morning.

It’s been three years since Pickles left Tomahawk, headed for Los Angeles with his big black duffle slung over his shoulder, goosebumps showing through the holes in the thighs of his ripped up jeans as he told Seth to _Go home. Fack aff. Have a nice life._ Five months later, a postcard arrived in the mailbox – blank, aside from the address. Like Pickles had been afraid of what he might write. On the front, a blood-red sunrise behind the sign on Hollywood Hills, cut through with a white seam where the card had been folded in half, probably shoved in Pickles’ back pocket for a while until he happened upon the change to buy a stamp.

Seth had saved it, planned to rub it in Pickles’ face whenever he gave up on L.A. and came crawling back home, but summer passed, then Christmas, then another year, and somewhere in there Seth smashed a bottle over some asshole’s head and ended up downstate, serving eighteen months for battery. His mother visits him every third Saturday, and though he plays the part of the contrite son – he just got mixed up, he tells her, ya know, with some bad people, and now he spends his free time studying for the SAT – the truth is that prison suits him; and yeah, being in jail fucking sucks, and he’s been counting the days until his release, but on some level, running low-grade cons on the other inmates feels a hell of a lot easier than trying to make rent working some shitty, douchebag minimum-wage job on the outside.

Pickles was eight the first time an officer brought him back to the house intoxicated, twelve when they slapped a pair of handcuffs on in an effort to scare him after he was caught shoplifting a forty from the corner convenience store. Seth’s always figured that Pickles is bound to end up in prison sooner or later – for stealing or possession, or maybe vehicular manslaughter – and now here’s his little brother, staring back at him from the cover of the May issue of Rolling Stone Magazine beside the headline: “Pickles vs. the World: Our new favorite frontman talks lawsuits, fistfights and SnB’s first global tour.”

Seth blinks at the image, and wonders if maybe he’s just _forgotten_ what Pickles looks like. In his memory – which is admittedly unreliable where his brother is concerned – Pickles is a skinny, slouching, dour kid who never combs his hair, and if he squints, Seth can see the vestiges of that same boy – the curve of his ribs, the faded freckles (and some not-so faded track-marks), and the glassy, dazed eyes that tell him Pickles didn’t quite manage to leave _all_ of his problems behind. 

Still, there’s something fundamentally _different_ about this man staring back at him, and it’s not just the fact that Pickles seems to have muscled out a bit. The photo itself is, well… _suggestive,_ and Seth doesn’t want to think too deeply about why that aspect of it has even registered. Pickles’ carrot-orange hair is still a mess, but it’s a deliberate, well-fucked mess, and his make-up is smeared like he’s just rolled out of bed after a five-day bender, and then there’s the fucking _snake_ – an albino python, thick as Seth’s arm, wrapped around Pickles’ bare waist, its head creeping up around the back of his neck and over one shoulder. Seth shudders. He wants to know if this was his brother’s fucking idea.

Seth glances around once more before picking up the magazine, runs his thumb over the edge of it, like it might feel like something other than cool, glossy newsprint. It’s then that he notices the little detail that bothers him _most_ – Pickles has traded the ring in his nipple for a barbell.

Seth had been lying on his bed, smoking a bowl and flipping through a falling-apart issue of Hustler when he heard his brother’s door open. He paused, cocked his head to listen for the sound of Pickles’ footsteps shuffling away down the stairs, but instead he only heard the creaking of the loose floorboard in the hallway.

“Are ya jest ganna stand out dere breathin’ through yer mouth, er what?”

Belatedly, Pickles gave a light rap on his door. “Hey, Seth? Could I like… _tack_ to ya fer a minute?”

“ _Fine,_ ” he answered, playing up his irritation to hide his curiosity about what might compel Pickles to pro-actively acknowledge his existence.

Pickles closed the door quickly behind him, then stood there leaned against it with his arms folded across his chest, looking aimlessly around the room in an effort to avoid eye contact. “Jesus Christ,” he said with a cough. “Do y’always gatta buy da skunkiest fackin’ shit an da planet?”

“Well, feel free to steal yer weed from someone else.” Seth laid his magazine face-down on his stomach and considered his brother. Pickles seemed a little… nervous? His shoulders drawn up tightly, chipped black fingernails digging into the flesh of his arms while he chewed on his bottom lip in that way that Seth wished he wouldn’t. “So – didja jest wanna criticize my taste in ganj, er didja actually wanna tack to me about somethin’?”

Pickles hesitated, looked down at his sneakers and asked, “How – uh, how keen ya tell if somethin’s infected?”

Seth raised an eyebrow and tried to ignore the tingling of his own vindictive excitement. “Ya know – redness, swelling, pain.”

Pickles’ frown deepened. Seth waited for him to leave, but he only stood there uncertainly, tumbling some other question around behind his green eyes. Seth never understood why Pickles always put on this front – like he _wasn’t_ a bad kid. He’d already been banned from the rec center by then, and from the public pool, the mall and the annual Tomahawk Autumn Festival; he hadn’t been invited to another child’s birthday party since third grade, and their parents were on a first-name basis with the entire Lincoln County Police Department. So Seth didn’t know _why_ his little brother insisted on putting on this weird, shy _act_ around him, like he hadn’t been the _first_ person who’d sniffed out what a total, raging fuck-up Pickles was destined to become.

Seth sighed and rolled his eyes, tossed his magazine aside to sit up on the edge of the bed and wave his hand impatiently. “Ah fack – jest come here an’ let me look at it.”

Pickles stared at him.

“It’s nat yer dick, is it?”

“ _No,_ ” Pickles scoffed, as though the suggestion was outside the realm of possibility, which Seth knew for a fact it wasn’t.

“Well, den fackin’ let me _see,_ if yer so damn worried about it.”

Pickles took a step towards him and unfolded his arms, fingers heading for the hem of his t-shirt and lifting it a few inches above his belt before he paused to say, “Ya gatta sweer nat to tell Mam an’ Dad.”

“Yeah yeah, I pramise,” Seth replied, grabbing a fistful of Pickles’ shirt and yanking up hard enough to make his brother flinch.

“Holy shit.”

Pickles held his breath. Seth could feel the heat of his skin, watched it react to the chill air of the room. “Didja do dis yerself?” he asked, brushing a thumb across Pickles’ left nipple.

Pickles winced audibly. “Yeah.”

“Is dis one’a Mam’s _earrings?_ ”

“Maybe.”

_How bad did it hurt?_ Seth wanted to know. _How much did it bleed? An’ who da fack are ya tryna **impress?**_ “You are such a fackin’ _freak,_ ” he said. He moved to touch it again, but Pickles smacked his fingers away.

“Fack you. Nevermind. I tat maybe you could stap bein’ an asshole fer like, five seconds an’ jest fackin’ tell me if it looks infected er nat.”

Up until this moment, Seth has remembered Pickles that way – covering himself with his hands, unable to meet Seth’s gaze as a deep blush crept into his cheeks and his ears, like his body hadn’t got the memo that he could stop acting like such a fucking _virgin_ already. But now, staring at his brother on the cover of Rolling Stone, Seth realizes that the boy who left Tomahawk three years ago isn’t ever coming back, and the man he’s become doesn’t seem to mind _who_ sees that piercing, and his eyes – half-closed underneath all that make-up and eyelashes too long and dark to be real – seem to _dare_ you to look, to keep looking, and all of a sudden Seth realizes that there are plenty of guys in lock-up who will probably jerk off looking at this magazine, at his little _brother,_ who’s always been pretty enough that it’s not exactly _gay_ to think about it, but now looks like he _wants_ you to think about it, and Jesus Christ the fucking _snake._ Seth wants to know if this was just some photographer with a hard-on posing his brother like a doll, or if Pickles has finally elevated acting like a total whore into an art form. And letting every inmate in the Wisconsin State Prison System come on his pretty, freckled face is exactly the kind of thing Pickles would _do,_ just to humiliate Seth, just to make him feel that terrible, twisted feeling down in his guts.

(And of _course_ it was fucking infected.)

Seth’s palms are sweating. New arrival magazines are not permitted to leave the library – a fact which he sweeps aside as he folds the issue in half and stuffs it down the front of his shirt.


	3. 2001 - Haulover Beach, Miami FL

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings/Tags for this chapter:  
> Drowning, Drug & alcohol abuse, Homophobic language

2001…

By the night it actually _arrives,_ Nathan’s already dreamt his way through this moment so many times that he wonders at first if he’s just lost consciousness, maybe blacked out in the sand the way he does sometimes. In the dream – (he refuses to call them ‘visions,’ because that’s some gay hippie shit right there) – Pickles is lying on the beach. And in the dream – like now – Pickles’ eyes are shut, his body motionless while Nathan stands over him, staring. But despite his overall stillness, dreamtime Pickles teems with life – the freckles on his chest and cheeks seem to move across his skin in a swarm, and his dreadlocks undulate around his head, waving and reaching like something _alive._ Even the moonlight touches him differently, refracted.

Here though – lying on an empty stretch of Haulover Beach in nothing but a soaked-through pair of tighty-whities – Pickles looks fucking _dead._ His body is limp and his lips are blue, and the way his head lolls to one side when Nathan’s toe nudges at his ribcage is enough to convince Nate that yes, this is really fucking _happening._

“Weird dreams, huh?” Pickles always took care not to sound _too_ interested. “Am I in any of ‘em?”

“Only the really gay ones.”

Pickles raised an eyebrow. “Seriously, dood?”

“No.”

It’s not that Nate doesn’t trust him, because he _does_ – he trusts Pickles the way he trusts his vital organs to continue functioning while he’s asleep. He’s never told anyone _else_ about his recurring dreams, but he still hasn’t mentioned that they tend to come _true,_ mostly because it makes him sound fucking _certifiable._ And even if he _had_ – even if he’d said, “Hey, man – I keep having this dream where you’re like, dead or something” – it’s not like that would’ve prevented Pickles from getting tanked, or high, or naked, or from stealing a jet-ski. But still – it’s his fault that Pickles spends so much time at the beach in the first place.

It was winter when they met; Nathan had moved back home after his apartment building was condemned, and found his old bedroom full of his parents’ things – lamps, a sewing machine, a stack of books with titles like _The Power of Positive Thinking_ – and in the back yard, a crew of men installing a new patio. He’d caught Pickles staring at him once, with a drill in his hand and a pair of screws hanging out the corner of his mouth and a look on his face that Nathan couldn’t quite make sense of. Realizing he’d been spotted, Pickles gave an awkward half-wave before returning to work, and that night Nathan woke up in a sweat.

The sound of construction started at 8am sharp – a cacophony of hammers and drills, the belt sander and that godawful circular saw, splitting straight through Nathan’s skull until he had no choice but to heave himself out of bed and find solitude elsewhere. Grumbling, he pulled on his boots and grabbed his keys.

“Sounds like ya need a new battery.”

Nate rolled down the window of his rusted, hulking Blazer to narrow his eyes at the man who’d waved at him the day before. Hard to guess how old he was – thin and kind of on the small side, but when he removed his baseball cap to wipe the sweat off his face, Nathan saw that he was going bald.

“Yeah?” he grunted. “Shit.”

Once again, he turned the key and listened to the sickly splutter of the ignition, pretending not to notice the way the guy considered him, green eyes sliding towards the company truck as he tied his long red dreads back over sunburnt shoulders before saying, “Dood – I could prably give ya a ride, if it’s like – ya know – _urgent._ Where do ya need to go?”

Nate’s always been lousy at reading people, but gifted when it comes to portents, and something about the question, the sunlight, the weird reek of Pickles’ hair makes him feel a sensation only describable as _rightness,_ like a bone shifting back into place or a key turning in its lock

“To the beach,” he replied.

In the years since then, it’s become a ritual, though Nathan’s not sure if Pickles thinks of it that way. They come after sunset and leave their shoes in the car. Pickles runs down to the water, still in awe of the ocean the way only a boy from flyover country can be. They sit in the sand. Snow-white sand that Pickles wriggles his toes into. He takes a long drink of whatever they’ve brought along, and Nathan notices how tiny Pickles’ feet look beside his own.

It’s easy to forget how small he is, how much of Nathan’s world rides on those slim, wiry shoulders. Thus far, Pickles has proven indestructible – physically, chemically – and while Nate’s seen him unconscious – even watched him OD a couple of times – the sight of Pickles’ unresponsive body has never _frightened_ him like this.

“ _Shit._ ” Nathan can barely hear himself think over the crash of the surf. He used to know what to _do_ here, tries to recall what comes next in the dream, but all he can remember is the week he spent lifeguarding at his parents’ HOA swimming pool – the smell of chlorine, the sound of flip-flops on concrete, Becky Thordendal leaning her tits up against the steps of his chair to ask, “So if I like, _drown,_ does that mean you’ll give me CPR?”

_Oh._

He drops to his knees and lays his fingers in the crook of Pickles’ neck, feeling for that simple little rhythm. It’s there, however faint.

This next part, he doesn’t even think about till later, when they’re back in the car and Pickles is cleaning the puke out of his beard, checking his reflection in the cracked visor mirror as though he might look like anything other than a wet, tangled mess.

“I oughtta charge ya fer dat,” he jokes, like it was nothing. Like he wasn’t just a few moments from dying, from drifting off to hell, from ruining everything and leaving Nathan right back at square-fucking-one.

Nate clutches the steering wheel in a stranglehold. “Your mouth tastes like shit,” he growls, and Pickles starts laughing and doesn’t stop until they arrive back at the apartment.

2006…

They don’t talk about Magnus. And why should they? He was a psycho and a dildo and a control freak, and they haven’t heard a peep out of him since Charles started cutting him a pissy five-figure royalty check every year. But beneath their forgetful indifference, there’s still something raw, at least as far as Pickles and Nathan are concerned. (Nate knows that Pickles still Googles the guy every once in a while, still has Magnus’ number saved in his phone [ _Mags_ ], along with Tony Thunderbottom [ _Marc_ ], and a few other people Pickles professes he’d rather die than speak to [ _Seth_ ].)

And they don’t talk about things that happened _before_ Magnus showed up and uncovered every one of Pickles’ unmanaged sexual issues, brought in this ugly kid who could play the bass with his dick, and then went and hired a guy in a fucking _suit_ and made the whole thing so goddamn _serious._ Everything that happened before that – the trips to the beach, the cramped studio apartment, the second-hand drum kit covered in stickers – it all feels a little too much like childhood. The relative innocence of it makes both of them feel kind of queasy and embarrassed, and they keep those memories to themselves.

So when Pickles gets schnockered one night and asks, “‘Member dat time ya tried to make out with me while I was un _can_ scious?”it takes Nathan a minute to figure out what the hell he’s talking about.

“You mean the night you stole a jet-ski, crashed it into a manatee, and almost drown? And I had to drag your ass back to shore and do gay fucking rescue-breathing to save your fucking _life?_ ”

Pickles looks at him with bleary eyes and gives a pathetic hiccup. “Yeah. Dat.”

“Obviously I do.”

“Well how come ya never tried it again?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you read this, thank you! <3


End file.
